A sailor's preoccupation with the shore.

April 18, 2010

The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead

There are pathways deep in the sea, boundary layers between thermoclines and haloclines where bodies of water differ in temperature or salinity and sound propagates effortlessly, echoing between layers, traveling around the world again and again with little loss of energy. Supposedly sounds have been captured by deep water probes lowered into these channels and by SOSUS buoys, the network of microphones deployed in major oceans to capture the passage of ballistic subs, the boomers that stay hidden in deep water with their payload of ICBMs intended to deter a nuclear war, or start one. Some of these sounds are old.

The sonar technicians peering into their oscilloscopes, intent upon their headphones, may actually be listening to the sound of battles fought at sea during the Second World War.

We’ve gotten used to the concept that the night sky is full of ghosts, the light from stars that have been dead for a thousands years, but the thought of ghost sound is still disturbing. It is unsettling to listen to the sound of ships breaking up under extreme pressure, bulk heads collapsing, hulls ripped by secondary explosions as the wreckage falls through miles of dark water, entombing the bodies of those who fought and died onboard, listening to the sound of their death as if they were occurring in the present and not a lifetime earlier. Uncanny.

The sea shall give up its dead and the sound of their dying.

It may be only an urban legend. I’ve been able to find only one reference and that in Lyall Watson’s book The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects (perhaps not the most reputable source) but if it isn’t true, it should be. The world would be a more interesting place where such unsettling things still happen.